#but i'm sick of hearing there's a new adult cartoon and having a 50/50 chance it's going to be a brickleberry

[nerdfighterwhatevernumbers]

i have a low cringe comedy tolerance so i do have trouble finishing a lot of adult animation- especially ones that have questionable humor like how Archer writes about rape- but there’s a sliding scale in how much they talk about sex, how deeply they talk about or show sex, how violent they are, how that violence is used, how much they reference drugs, but none of these things make a show more or less bad on their own.

Archer has a LOT of sex and doesn’t comment on modern society much, but makes funny jokes kids wouldn’t care about like this

Bojack Horseman has tons of sex and drugs, using them both for comedy and tragedy, also frequently talks about mental health while commenting on modern trends like Bill Cosby and normalization of toxic behavior from media. The media jokes don’t feel tired or out of place though because the characters are in Hollywoo and jokes about celebrities on twitter makes sense. It also has simple jokes like

See, this is a joke that’s too depressing for kids, but the punchline isn’t just that he mentions being depressed, it’s that he’s indignantly telling someone about his own pathetic behavior.

Star Trek Lower Decks is sometimes violent, frequently swears, often has drinking, but rarely shows sex, and has a lot of jokes based in Star Trek lore or in mocking military chains of command rather than based in the other things. However, being less intense than the other shows doesn’t mean it’s not for

adults, as it still has scary imagery like this

And the criticism of hierarchies that’s frequent in the show might not always land for kids who don’t understand chain of command and might not care.

It’s just there’s so many ways to cater to adults in animated comedies (not even mentioning America’s few adult action cartoons) and the idea that to make something Adult you just need to slap some raunchy humor on it without trying to be clever or that raunchy humor and maybe a topical reference are as far as the joke needs to go to be good is just so utterly BORING